Review of James Hollis's "Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives"

James Hollis and Stephen Morrissey, April 2013, in Montreal

James Hollis

Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
Chiron Publications, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-888602-62-3

By

Stephen Morrissey

             When I was six years old my father died. Several months after his death I saw my father's ghost, luminous and bright, at the top of the basement stairs. No one spoke of my father for many years after his death so that his absence became an even greater haunting than seeing his ghost. This new book by James Hollis, Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, spoke to me personally as I have been haunted by the loss and grief I felt over my father's passing. For Hollis, there are several ways in which we may be haunted and none of them are supernatural. These include dysfunctional parental relationships, complexes, guilt, betrayal, the shadow, and even a calling to an authentic life becomes a haunting when it is ignored. These ghosts that haunt us are the conflicted parts of our own inner being and they are able to destroy relationships and happiness and make life feel that it is not worth living.

            To be called to an activity is not something only for great artists or thinkers. Each of us has a calling to some activity, but this calling is also to psychological wholeness, what C.G. Jung called individuation. We reject this calling at our own peril because it leads to an inauthentic life. Hollis admits that it was with reluctance that he began writing this book. He was called,  however, by a dream about the American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and by synchronistic experiences that he describes in the Introduction. Hollis also states this writing was a "summons and an obligation," for a calling is sometimes not to an activity that we may desire, but one that we are compelled to carry out.

            We can also be haunted by a complex. Hollis quotes Jung in describing a complex as "the state of being seized or possessed" by the past.  A complex is driven by the fear, sometimes by the terror, of not behaving in accordance with the unresolved demands of an experience in our life. A mother complex is one that some people are possessed by, but many other complexes also exist. Those people haunted by complexes readily find excuses to perpetuate them. There is a lot at risk in understanding the psychology behind a complex, the foremost might be to lose a connection to the past to which one is attached.  Hollis writes, "wheresoever ready rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected." (42)

            One of the most fascinating discoveries of C.G. Jung is the shadow aspect of the psyche.  The keeping of secrets is an important way the psyche maintains the existence of the shadow. When we project what we don't like about ourselves onto other people we are being haunted by the shadow but we are also in thrall to the secret that is protected by the shadow. What we are afraid of or reject in ourselves is what we project onto other people. The history of the world is full of examples of such shadow hauntings. Evidence of the shadow can be seen when people make generalizations, usually condemnatory, about other people, often people who can't defend themselves from these unfair projections. These secrets haunt us and corrupt our present-day life. At its worst the haunting by the shadow can lead to genocide and racial hatred, or the failed relationships of people who are unaware of their own shadow. In either case, this haunting results in the diminution and denial of life, not the expansion and affirmation of life.

            Hollis's book is accessible and is a continuation of his previous books. It is Hollis's mission to help the reader understand his or her life more fully, often by taking an original approach to difficult psychological problems, or different stages of life. Being haunted undermines our ability to live fully the life that we have. Hollis returns again, in this book, to the topic of living the unlived life of the parent. He feels an urgency to communicate and explain this idea. Can we ever exorcize our parents who both blessed us with life and cursed us with their unlived lives? It seems to me that this can be taken two ways: the first is the obvious working at a career that is not appropriate for us or otherwise living according to the unfulfilled experiences that our parents wanted for themselves. It seems to me that there is another, less literal, example of "living the unlived life of the parent" that is to attempt the individuation, or self-understanding, the parent never considered important or was afraid to attempt. If our parents have not lived in a way that is authentic to their inner being, then this work becomes the inheritance of their children. The alternative is a multi-generational continuation of dysfunctional relationships, this is the haunting of families that can last for many years.  Hollis writes,

Of all of these hauntings, the greatest is the one we alone produce: the unlived  life. None of us will find the courage, or the will, or the capacity to completely fulfill the  possibility invested in us by the gods. But we are accountable for what we do not attempt.  To what degree does our pusillanimity beget replicative haunting in our children, our families, our communities, our nations? (144)

            As we get older, or face old age and death, we know that this life is a journey from birth to death. We have happiness and regret, success and failure, but the worst thing is the discovery that one's life has not been authentic to oneself. This journey demands of us inner work that is psychological but it is also spiritual and this spiritual aspect is ignored in our increasingly secular society. For many of us, part of the beauty of Jung's approach to psychology lies in its assertion that individuation is "synonymous with, or analogous to, what our ancestors called a divine vocation: answering the summons of God." (141)

            Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives is the culmination of James Hollis's years of communicating to his readers the urgency of knowing ourselves and resolving our inner conflicts. Most of us will be able to resonate to the thesis of this book, that what haunts us is the residue of our own unexamined life. This beautifully written book, a book of wisdom and intelligence, can help the reader exorcize the spectral presences that prevent us from living a more meaningful and authentic existence.  

This review was published in the winter 2014 issue of the "Newsletter of the CG Jung Society of Montreal".     

                                         

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Review of James Hollis's On this Journey ...

On This Journey We Call Our Life: Living the Questions, 

Review by Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's latest Inner City book, On This Journey We Call Our Life, is directed to those of us in the second half of life. On the surface, the inner journey is from psychic fragmentation to psychic wholeness, but is it really? Hollis presents the question, "What does the soul ask of me?" The inquiry into psyche's purpose, Hollis believes, is essential if we are to live sane, whole, and complete lives. For Hollis, our life journey is not how to find happiness; rather it is to respond to the demands of the inner life. Listening to soul will not lead to happiness, but there will be personal insight and growth.

The ten chapters that comprise Hollis's book deal succinctly with topics such as the shadow; finding one's personal myth; vocation; and death: all examined from a Jungian perspective. Hollis's references are to C.G. Jung whose "mission had been to convince people that a broad spirituality courses within each of us... [and that] those who no longer feel at home in any institutional confession, can also gain access to the life of the spirit through a personal encounter with the spontaneously generated symbols which rise from the soul." The aim of On This Journey We Call Our Life is to help the reader gain "access to the life of the spirit". The emphasis underlying this is on psyche.

It is only towards the end of On This Journey We Call Our Life that the discussion turns explicitly to the question of psyche about which Hollis provides a fascinating discussion. But what is "psyche"? Hollis writes,

Other than saying that psyche is the totality of who we are—blood, brain, viscera, history, spirit and soul—we cannot limit its meaning. Note that psyche comes from two etymological roots: that of breathing, suggestive of the invisible life force which enters at birth and departs at death; and that of the butterfly, suggesting a teleologically driven process of evolution and transformation, which in the end is both beautiful and elusive... While we may be tempted to romanticize psyche as the place of sweet dreams, it is also the source of devouring energies, self-destruction and demonic drives.

Indeed, the last two chapters contain the essential core of Hollis's thought and I will concentrate on these two chapters in this review. Our daily activities are given a noumenal importance when considered from the perspective of psyche. This discussion is not new to Hollis's work, in one of his lectures many years ago, given to the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, he asked the audience to consider the question, "Where is psyche leading me?"

Most of us begin to examine life out of varying degrees of necessity caused by not feeling good about something in life. As we get older, this inquiry deepens, and the question possibly turns to our psychology; we then need to "re-member" psyche, which both suggests examining our inner life and finding wholeness in it. Hollis writes, "... feeling good may be a very poor measure of the worth of oneÕs life." Hollis suggests three important things related to "re-membering psyche"; they are: "1) that we recall we are psyche's being; 2) that we seek dialogue with psyche which promotes healing in ourselves and others; and 3) that something wishes to re-member us."

Hollis also reminds us that our life is a manifestation of psyche. We "re-member" psyche in our dreams as well as in "historic patterns made through our choices." In this way, there is an intimation of homecoming. But where is "home" that Hollis refers to in his book? Home, Hollis tells us, is found in psyche. Indeed, there is an archetypal field in which psyche is objective, it is present in one's life in experience and history; it is there to be "re-membered" and returned to.

The journey home, Hollis tells us, requires "courage, strength, humility, and constancy to dialogue with psyche." The alternative to this journey is "the terrible feeling of inauthentic suffering." Indeed, "re-membering psyche is the task of homecoming." One's authentic existence can be found in the soul, in psyche, and the journey home is not only the presence of soul matter in one's life, it is one's spiritual base, one's true home.

But how is one to journey home? Hollis suggests that four approaches consciously manifest psyche in one's life. His first suggestion is to "read" the world with the informing presence of psyche. In the first half of life, we acquire wealth, position, and family. That is fine for then, but it is not a life fully aware of psyche. In the second half of life, many of us find a deeper fulfillment in the soul than we do in material objects.

Hollis's second "attitude or practice" for being aware of psyche easily follows the awareness that material things no longer truly fulfill us in later life. Hollis advises the reader to "do our private work of personal growth." Our years of life are not an end in themselves; they are a process of deepening awareness. Hollis writes, "life is not a place but a journey." The journey is not to a place, it is both the journey and the destination.

Finally, the corollary of a growing awareness of one's inner being is to bless life, to be grateful for the life we have. What is of importance to psyche? Hollis suggests that what matters is "compassion and imagination." Indeed, our individual life is a short journey when seen in the light of eternity. Compassion and imagination "extend us outwards into psyche in the world around us."

For Hollis, "the journey itself is our only home and our only hope for renewal." Hollis quotes from a poem by American poet Stanley Kunitz in which we are reminded of the tendency of "the ego toward superficiality." Kunitz's poem "invites transcendence through a life-long encounter with fractured depths and frangible possibilities." This Journey We Call Our Life is an invitation both to journey and to our spiritual home, to "re-membering" psyche, and necessarily to acceptance of paradox and ambiguity. "No matter where I live, my journey is my home," Hollis writes. More than truth, which is often subjective, it is compassion and imagination that move us beyond the personal and isolated manifestation of ego, to psyche and communion with the world around us.

Published: Review by Stephen Morrissey of On This Journey We Call Our Life by James Hollis, Inner City Books, Toronto, 2003. Published in The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, January 2004

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

On Glen Sorestad's Poetry

Glen Sorestad, League of Canadian Poets AGM in Edmonton, 2007

Ten years ago, I invited Glen Sorestad to give a reading of his poems at the college where I teach. It was a large audience, well over a hundred students, and I remember that the students loved the poems that Glen read that afternoon. Later that day, Glen and I drove into Montreal and had lunch at an Irish bar-resto on McKay or Crescent below Ste. Catherine Street. I remember introducing Glen to our waiter and saying that Glen was a well-known poet, that he was also the Poet Laureate of the Province of Saskatchewan. A few minutes later the waiter returned with a guest book for Glen to sign, I had no idea restaurants had guest books.

Once, someone wrote in a review of a reading I gave that I came across as “everyone’s favourite uncle,” not necessarily what I would like to have heard but perhaps accurate. The only other poet I’ve met who could also be described in a similar way is Glen Sorestad. I remember Margaret Laurence being described by the critic Robert Fulford as nondescript, perhaps looking like a housewife. Appearances are deceiving!

Over the years I’ve read many of Glen’s books as they’ve been published; two of his newer books are Road Apples, an autumn journey into America (Rubicon Press, 2009) and What We Miss (Thistledown Press, 2010). Unless I am mistaken, What We Miss is Glen’s first major publication since Blood & bone, ice & stone (Thistledown Press, 2005). In fact, as online-chapbook editor at Coracle Press, I published Glen’s Language of Horse in 2007 and some of the poems in this chapbook are republished in What We Miss.

Road Apples, an autumn journey into America is an impressive chapbook. It is part of a body of literature—the iconic and archetypal journey or road trip across a part of America—that moves from particular observations to general comments about American society. The archetype of the journey is present in many American writers, from Walt Whitman to John Steinbeck to Jack Kerouac. Sorestad’s American journey is across a landscape of ranches, highways, RV parks, and tourist attractions. Sorestad is the outsider, the observer, the bystander. This is America seen through Canadian eyes, that is, it is the perception of someone who is easily assumed to be a fellow American but whose perceptions are always informed by a consciousness that is uniquely Canadian. You could call us “Americanadians”! Americans, unlike Canadians, seem to know very little about the outside world. When telling a waitress in Sioux City, Iowa that he and his wife have just driven from southern Nebraska, she comments that this is lovely and where are they from? They reply they are from Saskatchewan… “And what part of southern Nebrasaka/ would that be in?” she asks. There’s no guest book to sign in this American restaurant, and I doubt the waitress would know what a Poet Laureate is…

………

        Glen Sorestad’s What We Miss is a truly inspired book of poems. These poems are deceptively simple, they return us to the basic experience of being a poet and writing poetry. This experience lies in the ability to see in the quotidian, the everyday, that which is marvelous and meaningful. In the first section, “Moving Towards the Light,” we read poems of everyday experiences, of going for daily walks and recording what is significant on these walks: it is seeing the first robin in spring; the presence of a red-winged blackbird; the warmth of the sun on one’s face; rain; geese; an old man and his dog; the sun coming through some clouds; a woman walking two dogs; a decapitated field mouse… All poets have had this experience: we place importance on observations that other people either ignore or aren’t aware of or think are too trivial to comment on. The poet gives these experiences significance and importance, he gives people a different way to perceive reality. As well, informing Sorestad’s poems is the recognition of our mortality. We know that when he writes of “walking towards the light” it is not only a kind of awakening, but it is also the light that lies beyond death. “Towards the Long Night,” the last poem in this section of What We Miss, finds us in November, the decline to winter has begun, and we note “The sharp sting of wind in our faces, /we bear reluctant light through the park.”

Sorestad’s love of language began when he was a child; he writes of this experience in “The Language of Horse”:

It was words like halter and hames,
bits and bridle, collar and reins,
words his uncle threw at him
as if they were self-evident—
this language so foreign to him.
It was a childhood epiphany:
each new landscape he encountered
from that point on would come with
its own language, its own lexicon
to be snapped or buckled into place,
for him to become a part of and in turn
for it to become a part of him.

Glen Sorestad is a poet who celebrates his early life, his family, moving between the city and the country, but it is in the country where he seems happiest, a happiness of being in a loving family and in close contact with nature. For instance, “Snow Tunnels” and “Christmas Oranges” are both poems of a happy childhood and of innocence. His poem, “Map of Canada,” returns us to an earlier time in Canadian history, he writes of a large map of the country on the classroom wall, but this map had a different quality to it, it also advertised the products of a chocolate company, and now, many years later, the names of different chocolate bars are forever associated to places in Canada, at least in Glen Sorestad’s consciousness! The final poem in the book, “Winter Walk,” has at least two layers of meaning; it is winter, but this is also a walk in the cemetery, and Sorestad is one of several pall bearers of a child’s coffin. This is a very moving poem, it reminds us of life’s transience and the fragility of human life. He writes movingly,

At last they set their box down at the site,
consigned the child to cold and dimming light.

The beauty of Glen Sorestad’s poetry lies, in part, in finely crafted epiphanous perceptions of nature, a love for family, and memories of the past; in these two books we see things through his eyes and know something of the way poets perceive reality.

I consider Glen Sorestad one of our finest Canadian poets. 

(The Language of Horse by Glen Sorestad can be found at http://www.coraclepress.com/the-chapbooks/language-of-horse-glen-sorestad/.)

Review of James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World

Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World
James Hollis
Toronto, Inner City Books, 2004
158 pages
ISBN 1-894574-10-9

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World continues the author's exploration of the importance of mythology begun in his 1995 Inner City Book, Tracking the Gods. Myth, for Hollis, "is perhaps the most important psychological and cultural construct of our time." Mythologems is a term that might be familiar to some Jungians but not found in my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary or Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary. Hollis defines a mythologem as "a single, fundamental element, or motif, of any myth. The motifs of ascent or descent are mythologems. The hero's quest embodies two such mythologems: the hero and the quest, each of which has a discernible lineage and separable meaning, and yet synergistically enlarge each other." Mythologems are therefore specific motifs found in mythology.

We find in the invisible world the content of both our inner conflict and our psychopathology. Psychopathology is defined by Hollis as "the expression of the soul's suffering". Surely this description is part of the beauty and attractiveness of a Jungian approach to inner work: it turns away from a solely clinical and reductionist description of psychology and restores the numinous, the spiritual, and the epiphanous to the description of the complexity of the psyche.

This approach to psychology is not a flight from science (as it is found in what Hollis refers to as the therapeutic bible, the DSM-IV) or a rejection of the modern but rather it is a continuation of mankind's ancient journey to wholeness and completion. Hollis writes, "To map the psychological terrain of a person is to engage in mythographology, to depict the various scripts which each fragment of the whole embodies... The manifold forms of the child, of father, of mother, and also our relationships to them, play out in the schemes and fantasies of everyday life."

For Hollis, who acknowledges he is only one along with many other writers, it seems "there is a malaise in the soul of modern man" that can only be brought to consciousness by reflection on the inner life. The archetype of the child has been lived out by all of us: Hollis discusses "the child as original form", "the lost child", and "the child god". Parents have an obvious archetypal function in the psychology of their children. It should be noted that others, who are not biological parents, can assume the parental role in people's daily life, for instance anyone in authority, such as a teacher or landlord or police officer, can assume some aspect of the parental archetype.

We know that the father imago is a source of empowerment for the young and when absent can result in disempowerment. Hollis writes, "... whenever we are dealing with our own capacity or impotence, whenever we are serving the imago Dei or questioning its relevance to our actual life, we are dealing with the father archetype in all its many forms." Part of the empowering role of the father is that the child will seek to overthrow whatever symbol of authority is necessary for the child to achieve an authentic life of his or her own.

The mother archetype is, as Hollis writes, "both the source of life and of death." There are positive and negative expressions of the feminine; some mothers nurture their children while others actively discourage the child's individuation. Hollis discusses "the son's enmeshment with the mother"; he writes, "The power of the mother complex to affect the archetypal ground of the son cannot be overemphasized." Men who have been enmeshed with the mother's negative feminine can remain adolescent—what C.G. Jung called the puer aeternus—or express in their personal life destructive "Don Juan" behaviour. Meanwhile, there is also "the daughter's enmeshment with the mother" and Hollis describes the different scenarios women experience from inadequate or destructive mothering.

Another mythologem of importance for us is the "Hero's Task" which includes the work of individuation. The "Hero's Task" requires that we "align our conscious choices with our individuation agenda." There are two other mythologems that should be noted: Catabasis refers to stories of descent to the underworld while spiritual rebirth, ascent, or Anabasis, is "a going up in order to bring the gift to consciousness." It would not be an exaggeration or untruth to say that many of us have experienced both descent and ascent in our life's journey.

The concept of the Divine, as a mythologem, also interests Hollis. He writes, "Looked at archetypally, a god is an image which arises out of a depth experience, an encounter with mystery." According to Hollis, God is not a fixed entity but "always renewing itself". Further, Hollis elaborates,

Gods ignored, which is to say, primal energies repressed, split off, projected, today show up as neuroses. They are the animating wounds manifest in history, acted out in families, public forums or the sundry deformations of the private soul.

Still discussing the mythologem of the Divine, Hollis quotes Canadian archetypal psychologist Ginette Paris: "An ancient Greek whose destiny was going badly would ask which divinity he or she had offended. This questioning was part of what we would call therapy." With regard to the Divine, Hollis concludes, "The gods have hardly departed; they have simply gone underground and reappear as wounds, as inflations, as pathologies..." Finally, Hollis is critical of both science that is divorced from the human soul and fundamentalist religion with its dogmatic emphasis on what is perceived as God's "word". While science and religion are traditionally mutually exclusive, they have something in common when they reduce experience to a rigid set of rules and perceptions.

Contemporary American society appears to have forsaken the invisible world and has become, to use Hollis's word, "sterile". It is a society that can seem hostile to the multiplicity, variety, and complexity of the invisible world. Nevertheless, Hollis states that it is not too late to recover, by examining myth and its disparate mythologems that reveal the mystery and depth of the unconscious mind. Hollis writes, "The archives of our tribe are not so far gone that we do not remember a time when they were connected directly to the gods." Responsibility for our psychology rests inescapably with each one of us, but Hollis's book—written with intelligence and compassion—can help make the inner journey that much more accessible.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, November 2004

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Ottilie Douglas-Fodor at La Galerie Espace, 28 January – 2 February

On the back of our invitation to Ottilie Douglas-Fodor’s exhibition at La Galerie Espace, located at 4844 boul. St-Laurent in Montreal, Ottitlie had written “Stephen’s ‘coat’ poems were the inspiration for this series of collages!” It was a fairly cold winter afternoon a few weeks later when I visited Ottilie’s exhibition and saw this series of collages for the first time.

It was around November 2007 that I began writing a series of poems about coats. I was on a medical leave from work having broken my leg in an accident the month before. Then, when I had little more to do than sit and stare out the window into the back yard, I began writing poems about coats. The poems are usually well received at readings and I plan to include the series in my next book of poems, A Private Mythology.






Ottilie’s collages, inspired by the coat poems, show a human figure, on all-fours, and glued to the figure are different coloured or patterned, but still transparent, pieces of paper. The coats in the collages bring life to this fairly anonymous character who appears in each collage in the same prone position, bent over on hands and feet. The effect of this series is quite amazing as each collage evokes a different feeling depending on the coloured or patterned paper glued over the figure; some are light and lively, others are ominous and foreboding. There is always the juxtaposition of different coloured paper over an identical figure. These collages are simple but impressive; the figure is like a line drawing, unadorned by facial or other identifying features. One feels sympathetic to the figure wearing these different “coats,” they are like blankets draped over his body, shifting coloured shapes superimposed on his back. The figure reminds me of a James Thurber drawing, but in a much different context than Thurber's work. The image on the poster is entitled “Chrysalis, var. 2,” and there is a feeling of metamorphosis to these collages, for the coat transforms the figure from anonymity to individuality, just as the different coats in the coat poems are the vehicle for expressing something about a specific human condition.





What also interested me when seeing these collages is that Ottilie’s figure is in a similar pose as William Blake’s 1805 print of the biblical character Nebuchadnezzar. Curiously, just days before visiting Ottilie’s exhibition I had read The Book of Daniel in which Nebuchadnezzar appears and I made a note in the margin referring to Blake’s representation of him. I had remembered Blake’s drawing of Nebuchadnezzar (maybe from the William Blake exhibit at the Tate Gallery back in the 1980s) as facing in the opposite direction from the one in Ottilie’s series, but when I returned home and looked up Blake’s image I was surprised to see he was posed in the same direction as Ottilie’s character. Blake’s nude character is disturbing, with his long hair and beard, his muscular body, and the confused expression on his face. To me, there is something both shamanistic and primitive in Ottilie’s collages. They seem to come from the unconscious mind, from the collective unconscious, from a place beyond any single culture or tradition.

In some poetry, and in some visual art, there is an underlying element that is shamanistic. I think of William Blake as a kind of shaman. On one hand, shamanisim is the original expression of mankind’s spirituality, it is both global and "experientially atemporal" (that's an awkward phrase by which I mean that time, whether five years or five thousand years, does not alter what shaman's experience); what the shaman experiences is archetypal. On the other hand, organized religion is an expression of mankind’s spirituality that is culturally based and usually associated with, or identified with, a specific geographical location. This is not to say one is better than the other, it is only to differentiate between the two. I believe the poem that inspired Ottilie Douglas-Fodor's collages in this exhibition was “The Shaman’s Coat”:

The Shaman’s Coat

The pockets of the shaman’s coat,
are like holes in the ground,
worms wrap around my fingers
when I dig my hands into the black earth
of these pockets.

My shaman’s coat
when opened wide reveals a dozen
wrist watches in the coat lining
set to distant time zones.

My shaman’s coat is long and grey
and smells feral, like honey bees
in a hive. Left in a theatre cloak room
the coat is returned smelling of perfume
picked up when pressed against
a woman’s stylish coat.

My shaman’s coat has a life of its own,
sometimes it disappears, visits a stranger’s home
where it is an honoured guest,
fêted, wined, and dined until the coat
emits a protracted burp then sighs
and falls limp and rag-like
asleep on the living room couch.

This coat can walk the streets
on its shamanic journey.
It is not a coat that likes a crowd.
It is an introverted coat—
at parties it finds a secluded coat rack
where it won’t be bothered
by the noise and talk
of normal people.

The shaman’s coat
flies over the city,
enters tunnels, caves,
and office buildings;
stands on a beach,
the sea and sky gunmetal grey,
while the wind blows into a storm.
Wearing my shaman’s coat,
pulled like a blanket over my shoulders,
I am on a journey I began at birth
and will end on the day
of my death.

Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems

Here is the review of Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems that I wrote in 1990. The original article also included reviews of five other poets; they are Cathy Ford, R.A.D. Ford, Lee, Singleton, and Wayman.
_________________________________

Review by Stephen Morrissey
The Antigonish Review, no. 81-82
spring-summer 1990


While our society has become increasingly transient, some poets remind us of how important geography is to the individual's spiritual well-being. Douglas Lochhead's Upper Cape Poems celebrate the Tantramar marsh region between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia; they show how familiarity with a geographical region need not lead to boredom with that area, but possibly to a greater awareness of life's diversity and the individual's inner life. Lochhead's poems are simple, direct, and extremely concise; his language has a definite rhythm that is never dull. There is no inflated ego in this work; indeed, there is an attractive understatement of both theme and emotion. In one poem he writes:

For months
leading to years
I counted you
my love
not saying much
because quite frankly
I am not much
good at it.

Once I did
say something
the white wine
was part of it,
you said it was mutual.

Now your silence
from this distance
deafens my days
I find the only way
to forget is to douse
myself in the shower
and curse.

Oh yes,
I blast myself
more often than you.

Unlike many poets, Lochhead is capable of changing the rhythm of his language. He is not a one-dimensional poet with only one song in her repertoire. "Tantramar, again, again" ends with these lines that give a feeling of actually being at the marsh:

gone great wind gone down
now to stillness and full July grasses
where they stood scything
stifling the wood never left them
gone though gone and great it was.

These poems bear repeated readings; this is only one indication that his work demands our attention. In "The woods" Lochhead writes:

I walked into the woods
all nearby to be seen
from the kitchen window
wild raspberry canes
brought blood to my arms
the brook was deceptive
leaving my feet mud brown

where there were birds
they vanished in alarm
the birds I had named
given my time

and the woods filled
with a new silence
the maples shading red
as the blood on my arm

it was the going in
to the woods
the neat place
I had thought tamed

but it brought blood
and a new kind of life

Lochhead's poems demand an aesthetic response, not only an intellectual analysis of his themes and ideas. A few of the poems in this book are transparent, their absence would not have detracted from the overall effectiveness of Upper Cape Poems. Lochhead's poems are a psychic map of one man's journey through life, always paying strict attention to the detail of his place and time. In Lochhead's faithfulness to detail we discover the human poet behind his words, but we also make a second, equally important discovery: it is our own self grown more human as we see life and experience compassionately revealed in these poems.

Douglas Lochhead's new book, review

Painting by John Hammond, 1905; Hammond was based in Sackville, New Brunswick

Looking into Trees, by Douglas Lochhead 

(Sybertooth Inc., Sackville, New Brunswick, 2009) 

Review by Stephen Morrissey 

Go wind, go green, go move it into great shiftings “looking into trees” Douglas Lochhead’s extensive body of work shows a lifelong dedication, passion, and commitment to poetry. The poems in Lochhead’s new book, Looking into Trees, as one finds in his other books, are pared down and concise. As the title suggests, we may look into trees, but what do “trees” suggest, what do they mean to the poet and to the reader, what is our meditation on trees? As an archetype “trees” have always interested me, beginning with my own first book of poems, The Trees of Unknowing (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1978). First, one thinks of the roots of trees, of being rooted in the ground of our existence, the physical, the earth from which life generates. There is also another aspect to trees, there are the trees’ branches that reach into the sky, into the heavens above us. Trees, then, suggest both the physical world and the spiritual realm. Trees also suggest a meeting of the two worlds, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. 

Indeed, Looking into Trees is a wonderful and evocative title. It is not looking at trees, which is a passive act, but looking into trees which suggests an investigation— “I will look into the situation”—this also suggests taking care of a situation that requires some open-ended study. Four poems in Lochhead’s book stand out, they are those entitled “Exhibits for the Lord,” numbered one to four. These poems give the reader a portal through which to enter into both the poetic and spiritual experience. This perception is an awareness of the presence of God in Lochhead`s daily life. When is God present to us? In the poems, God is present all the time. In the first poem, the “exhibits” are in the form of a morning and evening walk and seeing flowers growing in people’s gardens, these are all “exhibits for the Lord.” There is an ambiguity in this: are they exhibits or evidence for the presence of God, or are they what we present to God as an exhibit, or evidence, of our belief in Him? The second poem’s exhibit is that of the presence of children. In this poem we move from the world of experience to the uncorrupted world of a child’s innocence, and this is a cause for prayer. Prayer in this poem is not the ostentatious exhibition of ego that Jesus warned against, but spontaneous prayer that is a conversation with God. I am told that Einstein did not believe in God, but he nevertheless engaged in an on-going conversation with God. Prayer, then, is a conversation with the Divine. 

An experience of God, it seems to me, comes uninvited, unannounced, in God’s own time. We wander, as I have done, in the exile of a self-made desert until we return to God, as I have also done. Exhibit three presents this to us. It is sometimes enjoyable to read a detective novel, to be distracted when we can`t sleep. This, however, might also be the time when God makes His presence felt; Lochhead writes, “... words took me up saying REJOICE/ and it was God’s day again…” The fourth exhibit reminds us that in our daily living—the “Holy Living,” and “the slide rule possibility of Holy dying”—there is the constant presence of rejoicing, for one who is living in the presence of God is also rejoicing that God is in his life. The reproductions of paintings in Looking into Trees, by Kenneth Lochhead (Douglas Lochhead’s brother), who is an eminent visual artist in his own right, enhance the poems in the book. The paintings present a similar vision of life as one finds in the poems, and they show that, as I have always believed, poetry and visual art have more in common than poetry and other genres of written expression, for instance the novel. 

Notes: 1. My review of Douglas Lochhead’s Upper Cape Poems (Goose Lane Editions, Fredericton, 1989) appeared in the Antigonish Review, nos. 81-82, spring-summer 1990. 2. I also recommend these other books by Douglas Lochhead: Collected Poems: The Full Furnace (1975) A & E (1980) The Panic Field (1984) The Tiger in the Skull, New and Selected Poems 1959 – 1985 (1986) Upper Cape Poems (1989)

Review of two books by James Hollis

View from Pointe Calliere Museum in Old Montreal after a Jung Society 
of Montreal end of year luncheon.

My review (below) of two new books by James Hollis, was published in the spring 2009 issue of the Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal. _________________________________________________ 

Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves 

James Hollis New York: Gotham Books, 2007, 272 pps. 

What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life James Hollis New York: Gotham Books, 2009, 288 pps. 

The older we get the more life seems a journey. An excellent guide on this journey is Jungian analyst James Hollis, who is the author of two new books, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves and What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life. Both of these books will reward the reader with many insights into life’s journey; both are an invitation to psychological and spiritual wholeness. Hollis asks, “Why do good people do bad things?” To answer this question he turns to C. G. Jung¹s archetype of the Shadow, which he defines as being “composed of all those aspects of ourselves that have a tendency to make us uncomfortable with ourselves, it is what discomforts the sense of self we wish to have.” Hollis points out that “Of the many concepts Jung articulated, few if any are richer than his idea of the Shadow.” 

For Hollis, and other Jungians, an understanding and awareness of the Shadow part of the human psyche is one of the roads to wholeness and individuation. This is especially important for those of us in the second half of life; it is a time in which, as Hollis writes, “The critical summons is to recover a personal sense of authority, explore, thoughtfully express the personal Shadow, and risk living faithfully the soul’s agenda.” Of course, few people willingly examine their Shadow; it is usually kept hidden, avoided, or even denied. Some of us prefer to live in a cocoon of infantile expectations; others are complacent; and still others prefer to avoid doing the very work that will bring us depth and an insightful life. But this life, this journey, demands that we live intelligently and authentically, that we live a life of emotional and psychological maturity. Indeed, while working with Shadow material is difficult, there is a reward: this lies in the release in our lives of a reservoir of creative energy of which we had not previously been aware. 

This Shadow energy can find its expression in creative work, but is also shown in a renewed sense of who we are and a commitment to living a life aligned to our values and the “soul’s agenda.” James Hollis’s most recent book, What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life, will reward the reader many times over. I think it is one of Hollis’s best books for readers at any stage in life, at any place in the journey of life. Hollis begins by admitting that the book is an “eccentric compilation,” and it is! He writes, “We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being.” This is a wonderful invitation to be who and what we are. The book, then, is made up of individual chapters that can be read solely or consecutively. They are discussions of Hollis’s considered opinion and observation of life’s meaning and “what matters most” in life. 

A selection of some of the chapters’ titles will give an idea, a sampling, of what Hollis considers important in life’s journey: That Life Not Be Governed By Fear That We Consider Feeding The Soul That We Respect The Power Of Eros That We Step Into Largeness That We Risk Growth Over Security That We Find And Follow The Path Of Creativity That We Encourage Spiritual Crises That We Write Our Story, Lest Someone Else Write It For Us Each of these chapters can be read separately; each is a thoughtful discussion and elaboration on a specific aspect of “what matters most.” They are diverse subjects, held together by Hollis’s intelligence and insight, and sometimes explained more fully with literary references. The emphasis in the book is not to find happiness, it is to find wholeness and to live a conscious life that is in agreement with the soul’s needs and requirements. For at least the last forty years an interest in mythology (and the belief by many in the absence of a cohesive mythology in our society) has taken hold of the popular imagination. Hollis reminds us of Jung’s “myth for our time” which he says is individuation. Hollis then writes: “In fact it is a summons to service, of ego submission to values larger than those previously embraced.” Thus, our journey is one of individuation, of inner discovery and self-knowledge. This journey is the central myth or adventure of our time. 

Since I first began reading James Hollis’s books, in the early 1990s, and heard Hollis speak to the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal (he is a gifted and riveting public speaker) I have always found him to be one step ahead of my own thinking, one step ahead of me in my life’s journey. He has always been an astute thinker and a most welcome guide in these matters. If you want to begin reading Hollis, or if you have read several of his books, I highly recommend What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life. James Hollis concludes the book by suggesting the following, 

This search for God, this longing for meaning and understanding, while often frustrating, has given me my journey, and my journey has given me greater acquaintance with many gods along the way , all, especially the dark ones, worthy of and demanding respect and many good and many bad people, but always an interesting life. In the end, having a more interesting life, a life that disturbs complacency, a life that pulls us out of the comfortable and thereby demands a larger spiritual engagement than we planned or that feels comfortable, is what matters most. (p. 256) 

Stephen Morrissey

winter 2009

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.